Olga Broumas (born 6 May 1949, Hermoupolis), is a Greek poet, resident in the United States.
Born and raised in Greece, Broumas secured a fellowship through the Fulbright program to study in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania; she earned her Bachelor's degree in architecture. She later went on to earn a Master's degree in creative writing from the University of Oregon.
Her first collection of poems, Beginning with O, contains erotic poems toward her women lovers. Broumas was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1977, the first non-native speaker of English to receive this award. Other honors have included a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has been Poet-in-Residence and Director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University since 1995. She spends her summers on Cape Cod, where she, in the Eighties, founded and taught at a school for female artists called Freehand, Inc. (en.wikipedia.org)
Cinderella
............. ... the joy that isn't shared
.............I heard, dies young.
.............--Anne Sexton, 1928-1974
Born and raised in Greece, Broumas secured a fellowship through the Fulbright program to study in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania; she earned her Bachelor's degree in architecture. She later went on to earn a Master's degree in creative writing from the University of Oregon.
Her first collection of poems, Beginning with O, contains erotic poems toward her women lovers. Broumas was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1977, the first non-native speaker of English to receive this award. Other honors have included a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has been Poet-in-Residence and Director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University since 1995. She spends her summers on Cape Cod, where she, in the Eighties, founded and taught at a school for female artists called Freehand, Inc. (en.wikipedia.org)
Cinderella
............. ... the joy that isn't shared
.............I heard, dies young.
.............--Anne Sexton, 1928-1974
Apart from my sisters, estranged
from my mother, I am a woman alone
in a house of men
who secretly
call themselves princes, alone
with me usually, under cover of dark. I am the one allowed in
to the royal chambers, whose small foot conveniently
fills the slipper of glass. The woman writer, the lady
umpire, the madam chairman, anyone's wife.
I know what I know.
And I once was glad
of the chance to use it, even alone
in a strange castle doing overtime on my own, cracking
the royal code. The princes spoke
in their father's language, were eager to praise me
my nimble tongue. I am a woman in a state of siege, alone
as one piece of laundry, strung on a windy clothesline a
mile long. A woman co-opted by promises: the lure
of a job, the ruse of a choice, a woman forced
to bear witness, falsely
against my own kind, as each
other sister was judge inadequate, bitchy, incompetent,
jealous, too thin, too fat. I know what I know.
What sweet bread I make
for myself in this prosperous house
is dirty, what good soup I boil turns
in my mouth to mud. Give
me my ashes. A cold stove, a cinder-block pillow, wet
canvas shoes in my sisters', my sisters' hut. Or I swear
I'll die young
like those favored before me, hand-picked each one
For her joyful heart.
6 σχόλια:
Leda and Her Swan
You have red toenails, chestnut
hair on your calves, oh let
me love you, the fathers
are lingering in the background
nodding assent.
I dream of you
shedding calico from
slow-motion breasts, I dream
of you leaving with
skinny women, I dream you know.
The fathers are nodding like
overdosed lechers, the fathers approve
with authority: Persian emperors, ordering
that the sun shall rise
every dawn, set
each dusk, I dream.
White bathroom surfaces
rounded basins you
stand among
loosening
hair, arms, my senses.
The fathers are Dresden figurines
vestigial, anecdotal
small sculptures shaped
by the hands of nuns. Yours
crimson tipped, take not part in that
crude abnegation, Scarlet
liturgies shake our room, amaryllis blooms
in your upper thighs, water lilly
on mine, fervent delta
the bed afloat, sheer
linen blowing
on the wind: Nile, Amazon, Mississippi.
Circe
The Charm
The fire bites, the fire bites. Bites
to the little death. Bites
till she comes to nothing. Bites
on her own sweet tongue. She goes on. Biting.
The Anticipation
They tell me a woman waits, motionless
till she’s wooed. I wait
spiderlike, effortless as they weave
even my web for me, tying the cord in knots
with their courting hands. Such power
over them. And the spell
their own. Who could release them? Who
would untie the cord
with a cloven hoof?
The Bite
What I wear in the morning pleases
me: green shirt, skirt of wine. I am wrapped
in myself as the smell of night
wraps round my sleep when I sleep
outside. By the time
I get to the corner
bar, corner store, corner construction
site, I become divine. I turn
men into swine. Leave
them behind me whistling, grunting, wild.
Maenad
Hell has no fury like women's fury. Scorned
in their life by the living
sons they themselves
have set loose, like a great gasp
through a fleshy nostril.
Hell has no fury.
Hell has no fury like fury of women. Scorned
by their daughters who claim paternity, wed-
lock, deliverance
from the pulsing apron-strings of the apron
tied round their omphalos, that maternal
and terrible brand. Hell has no fury.
Hell has no fury like the fury of women. Scorned
from birth by their mothers who
must deliver the heritage: signs, methods,
artifacts, what-they-remember
intact to them, and who have no time
for sentiment, only warnings. Hell has no fury.
And hell has no fury like fury of women. Scorning
themselves in each other's image
they would deny that image
even to god
as she laughs at them, scornfully
through her cloven maw. Hell has no rage like this
women's rage.
Body and Soul
There is a joke it goes in Greece
that summer there was a futbol
match and the husband had
lost his lady. BITCH he shouted
after her WHORE WOMAN HEY YOU
BITCH. Greece is civilized
the cop said call your wife
by name. I can’t the man
said. Call her name
the cop said. Not allowed
the man said. Call her name I said the cop
said if you don’t the man said in the Greek futbol
stadium he said
ELEUTHERIAAAAAAAAA
Eye of Heart
Because I was whipped as a child
frequently by a mother so bewildered
by her passion
her generous hunger she would freak
as the swell of her
even her love for me
alone in the small house
of our room by the Metropolis and fling me
the frantic flap of her hand as if some power
in me to say I want brought the unbearable
also to the lips
and as it didn’t hurt
nearly as much as her distress
imagined it and set the set I grew up longing
for consummation as she did
beyond endurance
tenderness acceptance of the large
insatiable that grows so small
and grateful if allowed
its portion of sun
so that the images that led me down
the spiral of forgetting self and listing
like a phenomenon in the grip of its weather
dazzling or threatening but free
of civilization were the links
whereby her terror
made good its promise to annihilate
my will her will I couldn’t tell
the difference then as now
when making love I can
breathe in forever on that rise
indefinite plateau whose briefness
like an eye in unself-conscious and the sphere
of the horizon its known line.
She Loves
deep prolonged entry with the strong pink cock
the sit-ups is evokes from her, arms fast
on the climbing invisible rope to the sky,
clasping and unclasping the cosmic lorus *
Inside, the long breaths of lung and cunt
swell the vocal cords and a rasp a song
loud sudden overdrive into disintegrate,
spinal melt, video hologram in the belly.
Her tits are luminous and sway to the rhythm
and I grab them and exaggerate their orbs.
Shoulders above like loaves of heaven,
nutmeg-flecked, exuding light like violet diodes
closing circuit where the wall, its fuse box,
so stolidly stood. No room for fantasy.
We watch ourselves transform the past
with such disinterested fascination,
the only attitude that does not stall
the song by an outburst of consciousness
and still lets consciousness, loved and incurable
voyeur, peek in. I tap. I slap. I knee, thump, bellyroll.
Her song is hoarse and is taking me,
incoherent familiar path to that self we are wall
cortical cells of. Every o in her body
beelines for her throat, locked on
a rising ski-lift up the mountain, no
grass, no mountaintop, no snow.
White belly folding, muscular as milk.
Pas de deux, pas de chat, spotlight
on the key of G, clef du roman, tour de force letting,
like the sunlight lets a sleeve worn against wind, go.
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